> Your arguments make some sense, but we need to look at the situation
>practically as well as ideally. There are a few overworked people
>doing new maintainer processing. There is not time to process all
>applicants in a resonable time.
I agree with this statement completly. But I disagree that manual
work is needed to add a developer. I agree that debian has social
norms that require manual intervention. I want to discuss those norms
and see if they are still appropriate at this point in time.
>Some applicants say they want to work
>on something and then work on a different package altogether, some get
>their account and then disappear altogether. The keyring already has
>many inactive (perhaps gone for good) maintainers. As we approach
>release, we want to try to control this situation somewhat.
I have already learned today that, apparently, there is no way to remove
inactive developers from the keyring. I hope that someone proposes a
solution to this problem. But I maintain the the problem of removing old,
inactive members is different from the one of adding new, active members.
>If someone does some attention-getting work before hand, it is going to
>catch the new-maintainer people's severely divided attention. Fixing
>outstanding bugs, adopting an orphaned package. Getting things
>packaged ahead of time; these kinds of things will encourage a
>developer to say, "I'll spend my limited time supporting this person".
>Don't think of it as a requirement, but an opportunity to distinguish
>yourself (it's not a big deal at that, just distinguished from those
>who have done nothing) and speed your application.
If I choose to think in this way, fine. But if I wish to work on
what interests me, while contributing to debian, the current
'debian social policy' is to reject my effort.
Carl